After decades at the piano, 91-year-old tries her hand at painting

AS A LONGTIME performer, Lucille Steele is comfortable singing and playing piano before an audience.

As a newbie self-taught artist, Steele, a spry 91, is a little less sure of what to expect at her first exhibit of her colorful oil paintings.

"This is a whole new experience for me. Of all the things that I've done, and here I am at 91, doing something like this!" she says with a laugh.

Fifteen of Steele's artworks will be on display through Nov. 11 at Cafe Arrivederci in San Rafael.

"I'm not a 'real' artist like people who are known," says the Mill Valley resident.

But Steele is known for the entertaining shows she and fellow singer Connie Gill have been putting on for Bread and Roses, the nonprofit agency that brings free performances to those who are isolated, for the past 25 years. And way before that, Steele was known around New York jazz circles as "The Thrush" for her sultry sound.

She can thank her brother Joe for that. Steele, the youngest of 10 children, was studying opera in New York when her brother, an orchestra leader and songwriter (he wrote "Frim Fram Sauce," which was recorded by Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong, and "The Brooklyn Dodgers Jump") convinced her to sing with his band when his regular singer was sick one night.

She was resistant — for a soprano, jazz was too low a range for her — until he told her he'd give her $100, which was a lot back in 1940 for a 19-year-old.

"I got spoiled, making that kind of money," she says.

She stopped studying opera and taught herself how to play piano.

"I booked myself into a club, and I had only 10 songs. The boss came over to me and said, 'You know, you're a very pretty girl but you've got to be able to know more music than playing 'Stardust' 15 times a night,'" says Steele, who performed as Lucille Vincent.

Taking his advice to heart, she bought a music book with 1,000 songs.

"I booked myself as 'The Gal With 1,000 Songs,' and I played with long, beautiful gloves and it went on from there," she says.

Steele toured with the USO during World War II and became a regular in jazz clubs from New York to Montreal, opening for Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason and even filling in as the headliner once when Frank Sinatra couldn't make it to a show.

"Showbiz was very good to me," she says.

One day, John H. Steele popped into a club in New Orleans where she was performing. "He came in to see if I looked like the picture outside," she says with a laugh. After sharing a soda, she says, "I knew he was the one."

They married in 1948 ("I didn't want to get married; I was having a good time!" she recalls) and Steele supported him as a performer while he studied at Columbia University and then at Stanford University, where he studied law and eventually became a lawyer for Standard Oil.

When they moved to Marin and their two daughters were young, Steele began taking art classes — jewelry, mask-making, ceramics — at the College of Marin's Indian Valley campus.

"I had time on my hands and I wanted to do something constructive," she says, "something that when I finished, I could say, 'I did that.'"

She only began painting with oil paints 1½ years ago.

"I love color. I look at pictures sometimes, and the thing that pulls me is the color. I just enjoy working with beautiful colors and things that came into my mind, I'd sit down and paint it," says Steele, now a widow, who paints several times a week, mostly landscapes and abstracts, in a small studio in the hillside house she shares with her brother, a daughter, three dogs and two cats.

"I feel deep inside my heart that I have to do this. Of course, at my age I don't know how much longer I'm going to do it," she says.

Steele doesn't know if this first art exhibit will also be her last. It doesn't matter, she says.

"I have to see how this thing turns out. I have no idea if my stuff is good enough to show. This will be a good experience for me," she says. "But, even if I don't, I still enjoy painting."

Vicki Larson can be reached at vlarson@marinij.com; follow her on Twitter at @OMGchronicles, fan her on Facebook at Vicki-Larson-OMG-Chronicles